These days I’m pondering the question “What is neutral spine”? Thomas Hanna gave excellent answers in his book “Somatics: Reawakening The Mind’s Control Of Movement, Flexibility, And Health”. He proposed 2 Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement lessons to reverse the effects of aging and to find back to a spine that is not too much flexed in any direction. Thomas Hanna uses slightly different terms than Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais, but basically he is talking about the same things.

Btw, in his book Thomas Hanna describes the 2 lessons rather briefly. In “My Feldenkrais Book” you will find the same 2 lessons, but in an extended version, and with beautiful photographs instead of black-and-white photographs of wooden puppets. Lesson 5: Cleaning up crunches, and Lesson 6: Lifting the head.

Now I was googling for pictures of neutral spine and couldn’t find anything meaningful. I found the well know postural types illustration, which is highly not satisfactory. Instead of investing a day to paint my own, I just quickly made some annotations:

I drew 3 sections, using yellow, green, and blue: cervical spine, thoracic spine, lumbar spine. And also a lowermost one for the pelvis. So it’s 4 in total. With these 4 sections is easier to see what’s going on.

I made annotations: 0 for neutral, + and ++ for too much,  - and - - for too little flexion.

You will find that using my quickly put together annotation “system” you will be able to draw 30 or more postures, not just 4. I figure the original illustration is pretty much arbitrary and not as complete as people would love to think.

I also whitened the dotted lines, and replaced them with black ones going from C1 through the hip joint. In this way now you can see if the person is leaning forward (and how much). The illustrations lack a leaning backward posture.

Looking at these postures, I would predict that B will suffer from lower back pain (due to overly contracting the lumbar flexor muscles), C will suffer from lower back pain (due to habitual flexion AND loading of the lumbar spine), and D will completely ruin his/her feet (starting with Hallux Valgus).

Now, this is all fun drawings and eye candy. The real challenge begins when you want to FEEL what neutral feels like. Instead of embarking into a 10 years Odyssey, I recommend taking Feldenkrais lessons for that.

In the second chapter of My Feldenkrais Book I elaborate on 5 major differences of Feldenkrais to most other modalities, including sports, Yoga, physiotherapy etc.

These days I came across a 6th, MAJOR difference: it’s impossible to do Feldenkrais while alcohol is in your bloodstream.

Even after a hard night drinking you – most likely – will be able to go to work the next day. No matter whether you are a salesman, a doctor, a surgeon, a nurse, a school teacher, an university professor. You might not excel at what you do, but you will do good enough.

You also can go running, do Yoga, play Tennis, take a massage. Actually these are good to get the biproducts of alcohol – acetaldehyde and other dangerous oxygen radicals – out of your system.

But you can’t do Feldenkrais. Because in Feldenkrais you attend to your nervous system. You re-organise your system, you attend to your innermost needs. This you can’t do when you’re whole system, including your brain, is intoxicated.

You can’t breath while you’re holding your breath. You can’t run, while you are standing still. And you can’t improve the function of your nervous system, while you are actively compromising it.

Now I’m 8 years into learning and teaching the Feldenkrais Method. I went through a lot of trial and error and for years I was not sure what it really is that I’m learning and teaching here. At least now I can say where to put the Feldenkrais Method.

For this I identified three large realms:

Sports contains everything that is regular sports like Golf, Tennis, Swimming, but also Athletics, Gym workout, Zumba fitness dancing, Yoga. Every discipline that strengthens muscles, works on your balance and coordination skills, requires you to become better and improve on certain movements and routines. Most of these will give you a high from the physical workout and makes you belief that this is the most awesome thing to do in the world.

Massage contains any type of manual manipulation, muscle relaxation, fascial work, lymphatic drainage, etc. No matter if this is classic massage, Physiotherapy, Rolfing, Chiropractics, Osteopathy, EFT etc.

Feldenkrais contains any type of  Feldenkrais Method work, including Bones for Life, Anat Baniel Method, Hanna Somatics etc. They are all about learning and neuroplasticity.

All of these three stand on their own, and are not substitutable for each other. If you do Feldenkrais but leave out sports, you will be in trouble. If you don’t go for massage for years in a row, you will be in trouble. If you don’t do Feldenkrais you will miss out on half of what being human is about.

Of course there are disciplines that try to get the best from all three realms (like e.g. certain types of Yoga, DellaGrotte Core Movement Integration, or many other). But in the end I think these three are clearly distinguishable and it’s easy to say where to put what.